Deserving and Undeserving Victims

By Christopher Shea

A refugee woman is seen at the refugee camp for the internally on the outskirts of Nyala, the capital of South Darfur state. (AFP/Getty Images)

Do victims of the violence in Darfur deserve less sympathy than Haitians whose lives were upended by an earthquake?

Well, that’s what they get, suggests a study that’s forthcoming in the European Journal of Social Psychology. The study identifies a tendency to view the victims of natural disasters with more approval and empathy than the victims of man-made calamities, and it also finds that people are more willing to donate money to the victims of natural disasters.

In one part of the study, British students read one of two versions of a (fake) article describing the efforts of a (fictitious) charity, whose focus was famine. One group read that natural drought was the primary cause of famine and that the number of people starving, worldwide, was in the millions. A second group got the same statistics but learned that famine typically breaks out when armed conflict disrupts agricultural systems. Questions then probed whether students thought the famine victims deserved any blame for their suffering.

On a scale of 1 to 7, with 1 equating with utter innocence, the “victim blame” score was 1.87 when the disaster was presented as entirely natural and 2.69 when it was framed as a byproduct of conflict. The victims of the natural disaster were also viewed as being more active in trying to help themselves (5.3 versus 4.6, again on a 7-point scale), although there was no reason to conclude this.

In a clever twist, students had the option of donating a portion of their £3 study-participation fee to the cause. If they’d been told famine is caused by natural events, they gave, on average, £2.32. Told it had roots in conflict, they donated £1.77.